Lionel Richie: What does “Tom bo li de se de moi ya, yeah jambo jambo” mean?
There has never been a word more hurtful to an artist than ‘old’. As much as they might try to keep the fire burning forever, age is an important factor in the world of music, and there’s only so long that you can play music before people start thinking of you as yesterday’s news. The true professionals know how to change with the times, but Lionel Richie moved his way into the 1980s with one of the strangest jumbles of syllables to be found in a pop song.
By the end of the 1970s, it looked like Richie was going to be considered a bit of a relic from the glory days of singer-songwriting. He may have had a fair string of hits with The Commodores and had some immortal anthems to his name like ‘Endless Love’ with Diana Ross, but there’s only so many times you can make sappy ballads before people start labelling you as too soft.
As MTV started to become the biggest radio station in the world, though, Richie also switched over to a new sound. Not having to worry about the same style of Motown hits from back in the day, the track ‘All Night Long’ became one of the biggest hits of his career, introducing him to the world of synthesisers and some of the most poorly-aged outfits of the entire 1980s.
Right in the middle of the song, though, Richie breaks out into something incomprehensible for most fans, crying out, “Tom bo li de se de moi ya, yeah jambo jambo”. Considering music was then moving towards the sounds of world music at the time, this is logically some kind of foreign language, right? Nope.
When putting the track together, Richie said the lyrics were written entirely as a joke, going more for the kind of feeling of the syllables rather than focusing on spelling, grammar, or, you know, general logic. That means that people singing along to the pure meaning of “Tom bo li de se de moi ya, yeah jambo jambo” have been singing along with a line that is straight gibberish.
Even though the song could have benefited from having a decent lyric thrown in for good measure, it actually really works without any meaning. The goal of the song is just to get people on the floor and dancing, and with just a few syllables, Richie gave a force to that feeling you get when you want to throw away your inhibitions and cut loose.
Richie still contests that there’s something to those sounds, though, telling the New York Post, “Somewhere in that made-up language, I am actually saying something, because even to this day, we’ll play India, and someone will tell me, ‘Yes, you’ve touched on certain words in [our language].’ As long as I am not cursing you out, I am going in the right direction”.
He may have been able to get people dancing for a while, but some of the other dance songs from around this time don’t seem to hit with the same punch, with ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ sounding like the kind of dance party taking place in an office building with a bunch of winos looking to get buzzed at two in the afternoon. Still, Richie did have the one song to usher him into the 1980s, and even if he spent the rest of the decade making ballads like ‘Hello’ and ‘Ballerina Girl’, no one could take this away from him.
